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Rajmohan’s Wife
Mantangini is Rajmohan’s wife and a deliberate oddity lurks in the title of the novel itself. Rajmohan is a non-entity, a mean character who vainly devices evil designs against Mantangini and Madhav, her brother-in-law whom she loves passionately. By giving the primary spot in the title to cowardly and greedy Rajmohan and sidelining the heroic and magnanimous Mantangini almost as a superfluous appendage, Bankim is perhaps astutely suggesting a cruel irony of fate. Indeed, it is a romance woven round Mantangini. She knows that her husband is a culprit but in accordance with the image of an ideal Indian wife she cannot implicate the man "to whom she had pledged her faith before God". However, she is also ready to face even the bands of dacoits in the malignant silence of jungle to safeguard the interests of Madhav. Eventually, when she manages to reach his mansion, "she grasped his hands in her own and bending over them her lily face so that Madhav trembled under the thrilling touch of the delicate curls that fringed her spotless brow, she bathed them in a flood of warm and gushing tears". This is the maximum extent of physical intimacy that Bankim allows the lovers to approach. Constrained by the puritan values of the Victorian Bengal, Madhav counsels: "Root out the feeling from a heart on which no impurity should leave a spot." Much of the charm of the novel springs from the early 19th-century periodic description of men, manner and locality. In concise chapters, the scenes are set amid the cocoa palm, date palm, acacia and mango groves. There is a hooting owl, a prisoner in dungeon, creaking iron doors and sword-wielding dacoits making battle cries from the jungle. We notice this mediaeval flavour at places laced with melodrama and the occult. Possibly owing to such imagery the readers have found Bankim’s connection with De Quincey, Bhavabhuti, Kalidas and Shakespeare. However, I have also sensed the reverberations from Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Sir Walter Scott. I was particularly anxious to know if the style would shift from Chapter IV, where Bankim’s own English is initiated. The inauguration was almost shocking: "It is a notorious fact that many eminent zamindar families in Bengal owe their rise to some ignoble origin." There is a tinge of Austen’s famous first lines here. On the first page of another chapter we find the description of Madhur Ghose, the main conspirator, as a person who "had the good fortune or misfortune of being blessed or incommoded by double ties of matrimony and was the master or slave or both of his two wives". Sheer and rapidly churning wit struggles to find an expression here. Not gained maturity as yet and much inferior to the brilliance of Austen we feel; nevertheless, these are the sure signs of potentiality that would evolve later and overcome many longish, over-energised sentences ready to go wayward. Some blemishes are there but they cannot deprive Bankim’s work from being called the first Indian romantic classic in English. It was written at a very young age of 25. There are masterful descriptions of the zenana and the underworld characters the sardar and Bhiku taking ganja. Eminently, this work also gives us an evidence that young Indians could write elegant English with very little political overtones in colonial times. It was a promising beginning of the Indian novel in English.
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SERIALISED
in 1864 in a magazine the Indian Field, this is generally
accepted as the first novel in English by an Indian. Since the original
three chapters in English were lost, Brajendra Nath Banerji supplied the
missing portion by translating it from Bankim’s own Bengali version of
the novel. However, there are certain critics who maintain that the
English version was itself the author’s own translation of his earlier
written novelette unsuccessfully submitted for a prize.